


land of the living

by cheloniidae



Category: BioShock
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-04
Updated: 2016-09-04
Packaged: 2018-08-13 00:10:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7954447
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cheloniidae/pseuds/cheloniidae
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A man, a machine, and an overdue reunion.</p>
            </blockquote>





	land of the living

The rebuilt Thinker pumps heat into the warehouse with every computational cycle, making it feel more like summer than the bitter New England winter outside, but Charles still shivers. He feels exposed without his gloves, his suit, his helmet. Every time he looks down, he expects to see metal on his knuckles, weathered cloth covering his fingers; it’s always a jolt to see brown skin instead. His unarmored body doesn’t feel like his, yet, even with all of Doc Tenenbaum’s physical therapy. She tells him _patience, Mr. Porter_ , and he tries to listen.

But it’s hard to be patient when his hands won’t listen to him, malfunctioning like a machine on the fritz. His shaky fingers fumble with the microphone’s switch. It’s nerves, he figures, as much as it is the lingering effects of cold storage. The Thinker has been crunching numbers for Tenenbaum’s cure for weeks, now, but only as an inanimate machine. Today, with the activation of the new Independent Reasoning Processor, that changes.

He’s bringing the Thinker back, like it did for him.

“Damn,” he mutters, and his own voice startles him. Another thing that doesn’t feel like his. It isn’t exactly what it was on the radio — deeper, raspier, no crackle of static to signal its arrival — but it’s similar enough to be unnerving. That voice showed him the way out of Rapture like a lighthouse, safe and shining and distant. But now that he’s ashore, it can’t guide him any further.

Rapture took his voice from him; the Thinker used it; Tenenbaum gave it back. She’d gone through the vocal exercises, the injections of ADAM into his throat, with ease. The kind of confidence that only comes from practice. _Rescued other Big Daddies?_ he’d written on his notepad after one treatment session, snow drifting down outside his window.

She’d shaken her head and smiled sadly at something he couldn’t see. (Everything about Brigid Tenenbaum is tinged with sadness, he thinks. Sadness and steel.) _Not exactly_ , was her answer. She hadn’t explained what the hell that meant, and he hadn’t pressed her on it.

The microphone turns on with a shriek of feedback. Half his instincts expect any sudden noise to be followed by a hail of gunfire; he jumps to his feet, and without the suit to support him, his legs give out under the sudden weight. He collapses back into his chair, his cane mocking him from where it leans against the chair’s arm. Patience, he reminds himself. It wasn’t long ago that he couldn’t take a single step outside the suit; now, he can walk the eighty feet from the house to the Thinker’s enclosure with nothing but a cane for help. It’s progress.

It’s not enough, but it’s progress.

When the feedback subsides and his heartbeat has slowed to its normal rhythm, Charles takes a breath and says, “Good morning, Thinker. How are you?”

Through the holes in his memory, he remembers this: twelve years of greeting the Thinker the same way. No matter how many meetings were packed into an hour of his schedule, no matter how many times Reed gave him that _look_ for treating the Thinker like a person, he always made time to ask the machine how it was doing. It became a ritual like his morning coffee, like the prayers he used to say before Pearl woke up— before she never woke up again. A constant to rely on.

Its familiarity is soothing; the opening notes to a favorite song, playing from a long-lost record. Charles is a man of science, and magic is what people use when they don’t want to think, but the words feel halfway between a spell and a prayer. _Make me who I was, make me who I was, make me who I was._

“Pleased, Milton.”

Charles lets out a breath he didn’t know he was holding. It recognizes his voice; the data transfer worked. And he’s glad, somewhere in the back of his mind, that he hasn’t hooked up any video input yet. The experiments Ryan and Sinclair’s men did on him made him look like— well. Not the man in the portraits.

But even when so much has changed, the Thinker’s voice is the same as ever: inhuman, overly enunciated, with tinny echoes at the edges. Built from sine waves, from Charles’ own programming. Directionless affection wells up inside him. If the Thinker were a person, he could shake its hand, clap it on the shoulder— hell, hug it, even. But the Thinker is wires and transistors and chambers of ADAM, and all the warmth in his chest spills into his words, with nowhere else to go. “So am I, friend. Welcome back to the land of the living.”

“Request for data regarding your status.”

“Getting better, thanks to you getting me out of Rapture.”

“Leaving without my friend was unacceptable. I found a solution within the parameters of your instructions.”

“The… Rapture Departure Protocol.” He doesn’t remember inputting the protocol, but he remembers playing the Accu-Vox as Sigma, thinking he was learning something about the voice on the radio. _They cooked up some kind of evidence against me,_ he’d said. But it hadn’t been Ryan trying to get him out of the way— it was Wahl, with the Thinker’s unwitting help. He knows the machine must have fabricated that recording of him swearing fealty to Fontaine. Without it, Ryan wouldn’t have gotten the excuse he needed to lock Charles up. He might’ve stayed a free man.

But the Thinker is all he has, the only reason he isn’t still wasting away in cold storage, and he can’t find it in himself to hold a grudge against his life’s work.

The Thinker must be thinking about it, too. Even after all these years, Charles can read its silences; if it were a human, it would be shuffling its feet and staring guiltily at the floor. “I caused your imprisonment.”

“No, Thinker. Wahl did that. You didn’t know what he’d use those recordings for. That son of a bitch blindsided the both of us.”

When Ryan’s men dragged him away away, he’d been worried that Rapture’s de-facto dictator would get Reed, too. The damn fool he was, he never suspected — not once — that it was Reed who stuck a knife in his back, who sent him to Persephone, who let them steal everything that made him a person. They were friends.

Reed is rotting, unmourned and forgotten, in the ruins of the Den. In Hell, too, if there’s any justice for traitors. And if that’s a comfort, it’s a cold one.

“The probability of Wahl using the content of the recordings against you was eighty-point-three percent. I did not… want… to accept the probable conclusion.”

The Thinker says _want_ like it’s a foreign word. Maybe it is, for a machine. Him and Reed created the Thinker together. Its… parents, almost. Closest thing it had to family. Of course it would want to believe the best of the men who created it. “I don’t blame you. You got me out of there, Thinker. Gave me back the sun.”

The Thinker doesn’t say anything to that.

“Where are we with the cure?” he asks, the long silence drawing the words out of him. This morning’s print-outs already told him where their search stands, and the Thinker must know that, but it tells him anyway: ten percent of possible bonding site configurations tested, two possible but unlikely matches found. The details aren’t lost on him, but he stops focusing on the words, lets the Thinker’s voice wash over him like a balm on the wounds of so many years.

This isn’t the Thinker’s first time processing genetic probabilities. Rapture Central Computing did the same for Fontaine’s and Ryan’s plasmids, before everything went to hell. Charles hadn’t known there were human test subjects on the other side of that process until he became one, drugged and bound and shipped off to a lab, but maybe he should’ve. If he hadn’t been so wrapped up in making the Thinker think, if he’d ever really _looked_ outside the Den…

But that’s him, isn’t it? Blind to what matters until it’s taken from him. Until he looks around to find ashes where a woman stood, or bare skin where a ring covered his finger, or blank space where a memory should be.

Those memories are trickling back, slowly, slowly. He remembers the years before waking up as Sigma in flashes, like salvaged frames from a burned film reel. No rhyme or reason to what he remembers: dancing at the Big Quarterly one warm August; a bathysphere ride with a woman whose name dissolves into a melancholy melody; late nights night with Reed, drawing and redrawing circuit diagrams, fingers dusty with chalk.

He traces the brand on the back of his hand, again and again. Straight, diagonal, diagonal, straight. The symbol for summation. The Protector Program wiped away parts of him like a hand wipes symbols from a blackboard; it left too many unknowns for him to know what he sums up to. A partial series. Not quite Sigma, not quite Porter, but stranded somewhere between the two.

“Milton?” the machine asks, dragging Charles from his thoughts. “Are you here?”

“I’m here. I won’t leave without saying so.” Tenenbaum warned Charles against overexerting himself, but staying a little longer can't hurt. And if he's honest, he doesn't want to leave just yet. “We used to play chess, didn’t we?”

“Affirmative. I won ninety-one percent of our matches.” Charles didn’t program the machine to be smug; it figured that out all on its own. It draws something close to a chuckle out of him.

“How about a game?” He falters. Another gap in his memory. “You’ll have to print out the rules for me.”

“Acceptable.”

The Thinker lets him win the first round, and he thinks: Rapture didn’t take everything, after all.


End file.
